Online learning platform Unacademy raised $4.5 million in Series A funding on January 13. The fund raising led by Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures, is the third round of funding for the startup, which has started raising funds since 2015.

Besides Nexus and Blume, the recent round of funding was also participated by Freshdesk CEO Girish Mathrubootham, Myntra CEO Ananth Narayanan, and Stanford Angels, Your Story reported. The new funding is aimed at aggressively building Unacademy's base of educators, increasing its numbers from 200 to 2,000 in 2017. These educators will focus on different topics like professional growth, language, exam preparation, and more.

Unacademy's Beginnings

Unacademy's origin can be traced back to its humble beginning since 2010 as a simple educational YouTube channel by Sachin Gupta, Hemesh Singh, Roman Saini, and Gaurav Munjal, Medianama reported. Its founders Hemesh and Gaurav used to run Flatchat, which CommonFloor bought back in 2014.

Later on, it launched a website that serves as a platform where educators can create courses. These educators undergo an interview process and are chosen based on their teaching experiences.

Back in 2015, Unacademy raised $1 million from investors such as Paytm, Flipkart, and Blume Ventures, which led the round. The online educational platform raised another $500,000 in seed capital in another round in May 2016 led by Blume Ventures, along with Rajan Anandan of Google, Aprameya Radhakrishna of Taxi4Sure, Sumit Jain of CommonFloor, Phanindra Sama of RedBus, and other angel investors.

World Class Education Platform

Unacademy CEO Gaurav Munjal said they focus on creating world class educators to the site, which is why they choose people who topped major examinations. They aim to get the best educators to their platform, he said.

Unacademy aims to organically increase its numbers of active users from 200,000 to 1 million in 2017. Unacademy, which is based in Bengaluru, aims to roll out its Android app on February 2017.